google-earth-picasaGoogle introduced a new Maps feature in which they embedded user-contributed photos into Street View. The new way of browsing photos has recently been enhanced with photo-to-photo zooming, which lets you explore some of the world’s most interesting landmarks and landscapes in an intuitive and entertaining way.

First release of user photos in Street View included photos from Panoramio. Today, Picasa Web Albums are also added as another source of user-uploaded, geo-tagged images.

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Millions of people rely on Picasa Web Albums to share their photographs with friends and the internet community. Now publically geo-tagged photos will help Google Maps users to get a better impression of a geographic place, especially for areas where there is no Panoramio photos.

These photos are selected by looking for geo-tagged public images in Picasa Web Albums. Face detection is applied to figure out images with identifiable individuals and image matching so that most relevant photographs are not included.

This feature is available at major landmarks around the world, in places as different as Paris, Tokyo, and New Zealand. It is so easy to seamlessly navigate between images from Street View, Panoramio, and now Picasa.